Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov (also Mikhael Gromov, Michael Gromov or Mischa Gromov; Russian: Михаи́л Леони́дович Гро́мов; born 23 December 1943), is an American-French-Russian mathematician known for work in geometry, analysis and group theory. He is a permanent member of IHÉS in France and a Professor of Mathematics at New York University.

Gromov has won several prizes, including the Abel Prize in 2009 "for his revolutionary contributions to geometry".

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Mikhail Gromov was born on 23 December 1943 in Boksitogorsk, Soviet Union. His father Leonid Gromov and his Jewish[1] mother Lea Rabinovitz[2][3] were pathologists.[4] His mother was the cousin of chess-player Mikhail Botvinnik, as well as of the mathematician Isaak Moiseevich Rabinovich. [5] Gromov was born during World War II, and his mother, who worked as a medical doctor in the Soviet Army, had to leave the front line in order to give birth to him.[6] When Gromov was nine years old,[7] his mother gave him the book The Enjoyment of Mathematics by Hans Rademacher and Otto Toeplitz, a book that piqued his curiosity and had a great influence on him.[6]

Gromov married in 1967. In 1970, invited to give a presentation at the International Congress of Mathematicians in France, he was not allowed to leave the USSR. Still, his lecture was published in the conference proceedings.[9]

Disagreeing with the Soviet system, he had been thinking of emigrating since the age of 14. In the early 1970s he ceased publication, hoping that this would help his application to move to Israel.[7][10] He changed his last name to that of his mother.[7] When the request was granted in 1974, he moved directly to New York where a position had been arranged for him at Stony Brook.[9]